Hello! My name is Rebecca Harrington.
I’m an Executive Editor for the News division at Insider, Inc., overseeing the teams covering Breaking News, Digital Culture, Science, Sports, and Voices of Color. We work across Insider and Business Insider to publish breaking news, features, analyses, and investigations on the biggest stories of the day. These days, I do a lot more managing, coaching, and ideation than line-editing. I’ve been at Insider for 7 years, and I firmly believe in our informal motto to be “Better Every Day.”
My specialty is finding the angles that make readers care about the news they need to read, and getting those stories out to as many people as possible.
I started out as a science journalist. I fell into breaking news, and love the speed at which it operates. At Insider, I’ve also worked with our Politics, Military & Defense, and Video teams over the years.
Journalism for me began as an undergraduate student, when I was the science and technology reporter at the Minnesota Daily. Some of the major themes I covered included notable research discoveries, diversity in STEM fields, access to technology, public perceptions of science, and dwindling research funding. I worked on daily deadlines writing two to four stories and one or two blogs per week. I was then the City Editor from 2013-14, managing four to six reporters covering science, technology, health, environment, business, housing, courts, crime, local and state government, and neighborhoods. We published four papers a week with a circulation of 16,500, which made us the third-biggest paper in Minnesota at the time — bigger than The New York Times in the state.
I worked at the Star Tribune as a student reporter on assignment on the health desk in spring 2014. There, I wrote stories on topics including healthcare disparities, sexual assault, pesticide protests, and HPV vaccines.
I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities with a B.A. in Professional Journalism and a B.S. in Biology in May 2014. By December 2015, I’d received my Master’s degree from New York University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP).
During the summer of 2014, I was the science writing intern at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. There, I wrote stories ranging from high energy physics to systems biology. I also helped facilitate a communication workshop for science students interning at the Lab.
In spring 2015, I was the Online Editorial Intern for Scientific American, where I wrote stories, identified pieces to publish from our syndication partners, and assisted with daily editorial duties. I was also the Editor in Chief of Scienceline, SHERP’s student-run online magazine from 2014-15. As Editor in Chief, I was the final editor and publisher of every story, managed 10 reporters and editors, and led a website redesign.
In summer 2015, I was an intern at Popular Science, straddling the print and online sides of the publication to tell science stories in the most fun and interesting ways possible.
I started as an editorial intern at Tech Insider in August 2015, and became a full-time reporter in February 2016. In July 2016, I moved to the news team at Business Insider, to run the front page and cover international breaking news as a reporter and then an editor. I worked nights, then ran weekends, then transitioned to overseeing the teams that run nights and weekends. I’ve amassed more teams over the years, now overseeing about 50 journalists across Insider’s News division.
I have designed and led newsroom trainings and guides on breaking news, what makes a great story, framing, aggregation, crime coverage, and shootings. I’ve worked with the product team on making our proprietary CMS better, and with our syndication partners to extend our reach beyond the hundreds of millions of readers we already have on-site.
I love what I do, and I want to make all my colleagues’ lives easier so they love it, too.
Want to connect? Please contact me:
Rebecca Harrington 